Unmasking the Powers

Not only the uneducated, but large numbers of the best educated, including government financial experts, find money matters the final mystification.

The "stagflation" crisis of the 1970s forced confessions from the economists themselves. According to former Secretary of the Treasury George Schultz, "We are in a very unusual period, where we more or less cast loose from [economic] beliefs that we once held to be unarguable. We have cast off from a large number of these old moorings, and we have not yet found new ones."

Economics has always had this unpredictable quality, as of a transcendent power operating independently of its human agents. This is not simply a "primitive" impression. The "free will" exercised by modern entrepreneurs--their responsible decisions regarding hiring, expansion, etc.--may in fact arise out of the best personal judgments available to them.

Their individual "free will" decisions, however, are being duplicated by hundreds of thousands of other managers, and "arbitrary" deviations (choices dissimilar to those of competitors) are usually quickly abandoned, as if invisible forces were at work to compel uniformity. The return to the pattern predicted by earlier growth suggests, according to M. Haire, "the operation of inexorable forces operating on the social organism." Perhaps Adam Smith's "invisible hand" no longer operates through competitive enterprises on an open market, but it seems to operate nonetheless.

Our language for these phenomena is no less mythological than that of scripture. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to contrast our perception of these "invisible powers" with the biblical authors. What we call "economics," "politics," "systems," and "social structures," they designated by a more inclusive category: "the principalities and powers." Unlike our more neutral, antiseptic terms, however, the biblical language has the virtue of addressing the fact that these powers are ordained by God.

It is God's will that we live corporately, sustained, nourished, and served by these supra-personal structures. Yet at the same time, these powers are also demonic, seeking their own advantage as the highest good, regardless of the long-term, best interests of humanity. In examining economics, then, we will be analyzing but one of the many powers that encompass us, serving and exploiting, benefiting and burdening us.

Economic Injustice in New Testament Times
It might be a misnomer to speak of a "Roman economic system," for the Roman state, on the whole, avoided direct involvement in commercial enterprises. Where it had to become involved, it practiced a kind of state capitalism of a slipshod sort. Not until the fourth century did it direct its immense resources toward state-owned businesses in any significant way.

Otherwise its policy was to make the world safe for merchants and to extract from them the stiffest tolerable return. Grain production was concentrated in Egypt, Syria, and the Caucasus; and some products such as Tyrian purple, Aquileian amber, and Pergamene parchment, were the monopoly of locales. Generally, however, transportation costs were too high to make a consolidated economic system possible.

There were no real companies in the modern sense. Some individual magnates amassed fortunes in business and commerce, but wealthy merchant families never succeeded in hanging on to their newfound wealth long enough to build dynasties of the Rockefeller or Rothschild sort. Rome was too quick to swallow these upstarts and expropriate their fortunes for its wars.

Since land was not so easily converted into the emperor's coin, liquid assets were quickly converted into large estates. The rich of the gospels were thus landowners, usually absentee (Matthew 20:1ff., 21:33ff., 22:5, 25:14-30). Since land was ancestrally owned, the wealthy had to find powerful means by which to pry tracts loose from their owners. One way was cash; the more frequent was foreclosure for debt.

The tenant farmers of the gospels lost their land through debt (Matthew 13:44, 18:23-35, 21:33-46; Mark 12:1-12; Luke 16:1-13). The pattern is known all too well by the modern sharecropper: goods undersold in the market by the large plantations, inability to meet bills, deepening indebtedness, sale of one's land to avoid imprisonment, or becoming an indentured servant.

Jesus spoke quite seriously and literally when he referred to our forgiving one another's debts (Matthew 6:12), and he depicted a king doing just that for his indentured servant (Matthew 18:23ff.). There was little hope for the poor without some such wiping clean of the slate in accordance with the ancient Israelite injunctions of the Sabbatical year and Jubilee. No wonder the first act of the Zealots at the outbreak of the Great Jewish War in A.D. 66 was to burn the temple treasury, where the records of indebtedness were stored.

Merchants of the Empire
There was no free trade within the Empire. Products that were transported over great distances had to contend with the high costs of transportation as well as a gauntlet of customs districts and their avaricious toll-collectors. It was cheaper to make poor copies of quality goods locally than to import them, and consumer demand made shoddy work profitable. The second century saw a sharp rise in decentralization and mass production of low-quality goods, with a resultant loss in artistic ability and innovation.

With the decline in the quality of the arts and crafts within the Empire, demand for luxury items from Africa and the East soared. One of the earliest radical economic treatises, Revelation 18, pictured with remorseless satisfaction the anguish of the "merchants of the earth" who will weep over Rome's burning:

...since no one buys their cargo any more, cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves, that is, human souls (Revelation 18:11-13).

A great deal about Roman economics can be learned from an analysis of this passage alone. Even a partial listing of the origin of the various luxury items gives an idea of the breadth of the trade:

Gold--Africa, Spain, Gaul, the Caucasus; silver--Spain, the Caucasus, Gaul; jewels--India, Arabia, Egypt (amethysts, beryls, emeralds, topazes), Ethiopia (emeralds); pearls--India, Ceylon; fine linen--a Roman monopoly within Egypt; also produced in the Caucasus, Spain, Anatolia, Palestine, Syria; purple--a Tyrian monopoly with a new rival in Mauritania under Augustus; silk--China, India; scarlet--Tyre; scented and costly woods--Pontus, Somalia, India, Africa, Mauritania; ivory--India, Africa; cinnamon--India; spices--India, Ceylon, Africa, Arabia; incense--Africa, Arabia, India; wine--Italy, Asia Minor, the Greek Islands, Spain, Gaul; oil--North Africa, Palestine, Italy; fine flour and wheat--Egypt, Syria, the Caucasus, North Africa; cattle and sheep--Northern Italy; and slaves--all conquered territories, especially Syria, Bithynia, Africa, and, after the Great War in 70 C.E., Judea.

Freedom to travel made it possible for merchants from every nation to engage in this traffic. Syria, Egypt, and Ephesus were the chief depots for the luxury trade wending its way toward Rome. Trade with the Far East, which had flourished under Alexander and later under the Egyptian Ptolemies, had languished during the early Roman period. Gradually it was revived, creating a balance of trade with the East that was unfavorable to Rome, which lacked desirable exports.

Since it was cheaper to ship wheat to Rome from Egypt than to move it overland within Italy, Italian farmers switched to growing feed-grains for livestock, which could then be driven on hoof to Rome. The result was an even deeper shortage of wheat in Italy, greater dependency on Egypt and Syria, and greater vulnerability to famine in the event of natural disaster: exactly the pattern into which our own world economy has fallen.

The same held for the province of Asia: wine rendered five times more profit than wheat off the same acreage, so its production undercut local grain cultivation. Frequent famines were the result. Domitian sought to provide relief in A.D. 92 by decreeing that the vines should be uprooted in favor of grains, but the landed interests forced him to withdraw his edict and to impose sanctions on those who allowed their old vineyards to go out of cultivation. Hence the dry outrage of Revelation 6:6:

And I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures saying, "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not harm oil and wine!"

Whereas in Cicero's time (to 43 C.E.) a denarius, the day's wage, bought 12 quarts of wheat and 24 of barley, now inflation had so eaten up the denarius that the family could no longer buy enough to eat. The fact that it is God who speaks here on behalf of the poor, and speaks virtually nowhere else in the book of Revelation until 21:5, is evidence of the depth of God's anguish on behalf of the poor.

One can scarcely avoid comparison with today, when grains are grown for alcoholic beverages and for cattle feed, while other farmers are paid to allow their fields to go out of cultivation, despite massive starvation.

It was into this Empire that the gospel spread. The New Testament abounds with reflections of the general distress the poor suffered at the hands of landowners, bankers, and creditors.

Jesus and Wealth
Jesus wasted no time in declaring for the poor (Mark 10:17-30; Luke 6:20-26, 12:13-14,15, 16-20, 22-31, 32-34, 16:19ff.), and his disciples were those who would voluntarily join their ranks (Mark 10:17-30; Luke 1:53, 12:21). He identified the world's great idol as Mammon (Matthew 6:24), by which he meant money, or property in general, as a power no longer under human control and no longer in the service of human needs. The chief manifestation of the god Mammon is accumulated wealth.

Thus, when a rich man asked Jesus the way to eternal life, Jesus told him to sell all he had, give it to the poor, and follow him (Mark 10:17-22). Jesus' ruthlessness here is overwhelming; he refused even to use the occasion of the man's conversion as a way to fund his own band. Nor did he plead with the man to change his attitude toward his wealth and practice better stewardship of the "largess bestowed upon him by God," as our preachers like to put it. Instead, he demanded complete divestiture of the rich man's wealth.

In the discussion which this exchange provokes, Jesus makes it clear--against almost the whole history of the interpretation of this passage, which has been nothing less than a history of rationalization and dilution--that no rich person can enter the kingdom of heaven. The "eye of the needle" is not "city gate" in Jerusalem; that is a figment of medieval exegesis. It is the eye of a sewing needle, and it is easier for a camel to squeeze through this tiny hole than for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven (Mark 10:25). In short, it is impossible. The rich must cease to be rich (Mark 10:23-31; Luke 1:53, 3:10, 12:32-34, 14:33, 19:8-10).

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus indicates the reason. The rich man "feasted sumptuously every day," as most of us do, while poor Lazarus was lucky to beat the dogs to the garbage. When Lazarus dies we discover him safe in the bosom of Abraham, whereas the rich man cries out in torment from hell (Luke 16:19-31). This account, at every stage of its development, is not the original pie-in-the-sky argument whereby the poor are lulled into acquiescence with the hope of a heavenly reversal. On the contrary, it demonstrates the impossibility of salvation for those who promote a situation which causes inequities and those who gorge themselves on the illicit fruits of their injustice.

Jesus permitted no one to be his disciple while clinging to accumulated wealth. His retinue shared what they had in common (Luke 8:1-3), a practice which the early church continued in a most dramatic way (Acts 2:45, 3:6, 4:32 - 5:11; 2 Corinthians 6:10; 8:2; Revelation 1:9, 7:16-17).

Mammon and the Early Church
Because Jesus' followers expected the world to end immediately, they developed no economic strategies. Since they expected the kingdom any moment, they merely liquidated assets and lived off the proceeds until the Jerusalem church was destitute.

Paul, too, anticipated a speedy end. Apart from raising support for the Jerusalem church, his main advice was for those who buy to live "as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away" (1 Corinthians 7:30ff.).

Once the imminent end faded, this advice degenerated into mere Stoicism, a kind of bourgeois disinterestedness which made toleration of inequities all too easy, a result Paul would have deplored. By the time 1 Timothy 6:17-19 was written, the wealthy were being courted, coddled, and coaxed to be generous with a wealth they were no longer required to renounce.

The Epistle of James, by contrast, clearly teaches that the rich inquirer is to receive absolutely no special treatment, for it is the poor of the world who are heirs of the kingdom (James 2:1-7; also 1:10, 4:13).

And now, you plutocrats, is the time for you to weep and moan because of the miseries in store for you! Your richest goods are ruined; your hoard of clothes is moth-eaten; your gold and silver are tarnished. Yes, their very tarnish will be the evidence of your wicked hoarding and you will shrink from them as if they were red-hot. You have made a fine pile in these last days, haven't you? But look, here is the pay of the reaper you hired and whom you cheated, and it is shouting out against you! And the cries of the other laborers you swindled are heard by the Lord of Hosts himself. Yes, you have had a magnificent time on this earth, and have indulged yourselves to the full. You have picked out just what you wanted like soldiers looting after battle. You have condemned and ruined innocent men in your career, and they have been powerless to stop you (James 5:1-6, Phillips).

Here, at the navel of society's underbelly, there is no mystification of economics at all. James calls it straight, just like the Seer of the Apocalypse. These biblical authors saw what some of us are only now beginning to grasp: a total aggregation of power in a system inimical to life. Never mind that they lacked analytical tools for diagnosing it--ours have not proven all that good either.

They called it Mammon. They saw it concentrated in Rome. By 95 C.E. the author of Revelation was able to describe the emperor-cult with clairvoyant precision as a consolidation of power with religious trappings to legitimize it and economic sanctions to enforce it. Among the characteristics of the Roman civil religion and its priesthood was this:

It causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name (Revelation 13:16ff).

Today we are familiar with some of the same forms of economic strangulation: the blacklist, refusal of seller's or builder's permits, requirement of a social security number for every conceivable non-social-security purpose, and unemployability because of political, religious, or economic views.

Our economic system, of course, is scarcely comparable to that of the first centuries of our era. Whether it be the state capitalism of Russia or the monopoly capitalism of the U.S., the decisive difference between then and now lies in the importance placed on economics today. Economics is an abstraction which dominates us beyond the farthest reaches of awareness.

Our entire social system is a giant machine of production. People are "units of production," and the public, "consumers." We have made economic growth the primary social good. We pass off the problem of poverty as an outstanding debt to be paid off by further economic growth, though by now we should have learned that increased productivity does not in fact resolve inequities in the distribution of wealth.

Consumerism, as the political philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, has become the only universally available mode of participation in the cult of modern society. When poor African Americans buy fancy cars, or destitute Mexican children shine shoes in order to buy Coca Cola at twice the cost of local colas, they are not just being "materialists." They are saying, according to the only rules society has laid down, "Damn it, I belong!"

We, too, have an economic system bearing the marks of a priestly religion, though it appears to be a wholly secular economy with no religious pretensions whatever. Modern monopoly capitalism is manned (there are almost no women in top management) by a new breed of idealists who see the global corporation as "the most powerful agent for the internationalization of human society," in the words of Aurelio Peccei, a director of Fiat.

According to Richard Barnet and Ronald J. Muller (in Global Reach--The Power of the Multinational Corporations), many of these corporations have sales greater than the gross national product of entire nations. GM is bigger than Switzerland, Pakistan and South Africa; Royal Dutch Shell is larger than Iran, Venezuela, and Turkey. These world corporations thus have the leverage to counter the virulence of nationalism.

The world managers believe that, by managing the world as an integrated system, they can solve the economic and social problems of the planet, including poverty, housing, unemployment, and the environment; and that by shifting personnel all over the globe they can inculcate an anational consciousness, helping to "detribalize" humanity. People will become citizens, not of their country of origin, but of their corporation. (The director of Nestle Alimentana S.A., Dr. Max Gloor, says that the company's executives must develop what he calls "special Nestle citizenship.")

Here we are faced with the problem of one power setting itself against the unquestionable evil of another. For behind the salutary idealism of these world managers one perceives another deification slouching toward the holy place, to set itself "where it ought not to be" (Mark 13:14). The "one world" these theorists long for is not the world of which Christ is the universal principle of cohesion. It is, instead, the world of a hierarchical pyramid presided over by the world managers themselves.

"The nation-state has succeeded in attracting from organized religion the basic religious impulses of man," according to a 1971 working paper of the Chief Executives Roundtable. These same religious impulses must be harnessed by global corporations, the document continues, if they are to secure the legitimization necessary to gain people's faith that what they are doing "is in the interest of every human being" and "will eliminate hunger and increase the goods and services available to everybody." Barnet and Muller correctly grasp the drift: "If the global corporation is to survive it must, in effect, establish its own religion."

Chilling. It makes Revelation 13 read like a clipping from The Wall Street Journal. John could see the "beast from the land" (13:11) for what it was: a pseudo-religion whipped up by the emperors and fanned by fawning sycophants; a religion which "makes the earth and all its inhabitants worship the first beast," Rome (13:12).

The process is the same today, only the beast is different. The world managers are, like the Roman Empire, manufacturing a new world-religion capable of legitimizing the world corporate system; motivating its devotees, the "consumers;" and gaining acquiescence. Its values are clear: profit, growth, survival; its priesthood: the top managers, keepers of the mysteries (not even the U.S. Senate can obtain copies of their profit statements); its god: the corporation itself; its acolytes: the advertising industry, with its capacity to create new needs and to legitimize the corporations. It even has a new ethic: the consumption ethic, which has virtually replaced the old work ethic.

One does not often find sociologists speaking biblically, but sociologist Robert Bellah does just that when he says, "The pressures to maximize the power and wealth of large government structures pull us along. It's like being possessed by demons, if you want to use the biblical metaphor, because I don't feel human beings are in control of it. And I feel that, if we don't get in control of it, these huge structures which know nothing about love and care and concern for human beings, but only about maximizing power, income, and wealth, will take us to destruction... We have to bring these structures under control, or everything we value will be destroyed."

It is probably true that corporate managers are obsessed with power; but it is probably not true that they are just personally greedy. Greed, the oil of capitalism, inheres in the system itself.

According to traditional capitalist theory, private greed was supposed to lead to public good, since competition would restrain the selfishness of each to the benefit of all. Now, however, monopoly capitalism has destroyed the open market, a possibility which already troubled Adam Smith.

"We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness" (Ephesians 6:12). We are contending against the greed, including our own, reified into systemic solidity by a host of persons over a long span of time.

The economic system is greedy on our behalf. We as individuals are thus free to have clear consciences, treat people politely, raise lovely families, live in nice homes, and care about humanity in general. It is precisely this institutionalization of greed that Jesus called "Mammon."

Because institutionalized greed is a power, the quest for a private solution is futile, whether it be individualistic conversion, personal insight through depth therapy, or increased awareness through meditation or encounter groups. It is hardly reassuring to learn that approximately half of the Fortune 500 top businessmen have been "sensitized" through sensitivity training. One wonders if perhaps an even higher percentage is nominally Christian. I have an axiom that runs, "Every good, by itself, is evil." The unquestionable personal enrichment that accrues from these "solutions" cannot affect the premises of the system itself; and it is the premises which are evil.

The great developmental push of the 1960s simply widened the gap between rich and poor. American consumer wants have been imposed on people too poor to attain their satisfaction. Local food patterns have been undermined in favor of American "junk" foods and infant formulas, resulting in a new kind of "commerciogenic malnutrition."

Finance capital, raw materials, and brain power have been drained from the poorer nations instead of utilized on their behalf. The idealist dream of the world managers has, under the scrutiny of analysis, proven a nightmare for the world's impoverished, now even poorer than before the corporations stepped into their lives.

One mark of a power run amok is the sense of powerlessness not only of its victims, but of its operators as well. The pressure of the annual profit sheet prevents overseas managers from supporting income redistribution which might create wider markets in poorer countries in the future, even though this would be in the company's long-range interest. These overseas managers are systemically inhibited from acting for the good of the whole.

Eight local managers in poorer nations who were interviewed by Barnet and Muller felt a degree of moral distaste and frustration with practices which are bleeding their nations of much needed capital and resources. But necessity prevents their doing otherwise: "If we don't engage in these practices, our competitors will, and where does that leave us two, three, or five years down the road?" queried one executive.

The world managers are being managed! They themselves are captives of values and commitments which set them at odds with their own deepest feelings of justice and humanity, and which render them powerless to change. It is not then surprising that job alienation has spread to as much as two-thirds of lower and middle management. The entire corporate enterprise appears to be losing legitimacy for many sensitive people in the system.

We should be aware of the danger of unmasking the powers without offering a vision of life's true cohesive source. The most telling consequence of this delegitimation, salutary as it is, is a high incidence of alcoholism, depression, drug addiction, and divorce among executives and their wives.

The Church's Response
Those who care must then ponder what is "the manifold wisdom of God" which the church might now make known to the "principality and power" (Ephesians 3:10). In words of utter simplicity, 1 John 3:17 lays this matter before us: "If one has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?"

Today that question confronts not only individuals, but whole nations.

The first step, of course, is for each of us to take individually. Our personal transformation will not change the system, but it is the indispensable prerequisite to systemic change. We can alter our own patterns of consumption: less fuel, less junk food, less litter, less detergent, less beef; more recycling, more conservation, longer use of clothes and products, rejection of style fads and the mania for newness. Our very values can change: we can slough off the spell of bigness, the love of luxury, the bogus security of owning things.

The values needed for justice and survival are the familiar democratic values preached by prophets and sages since the beginning of history: respect for human dignity, justice, frugality, honesty, moderation, and equality. "These values," conclude Barnet and Muller, "will not come to replace the contemporary outmoded values--competitive individualism, comfort, waste, infinite growth, and security through accumulation--because human beings suddenly learn altruism. They will come to be the dominant values in the coming century, if at all, only if enough people are awakened to their necessity for the survival of the species."

Change unquestionably begins here, in our own economic practices and beliefs, where the entire edifice of legitimations rests. We have been systemically "trained in greed" (2 Peter 2:14) from birth, and we can neither indulge in the pseudo-righteousness of those who deny their complicity nor assume that our hands are cleansed by mere recognition of the evil. We will be involved for the rest of our lives in pulling out the "flaming darts of the Evil One" (Ephesians 6:16) which this system has driven into our flesh.

We cannot stop there, however, or our good becomes an evil: a personal solution to systemic distress which leaves the system intact. Short of a total world revolution, I see no immediate prospect of displacing the global corporations. Revolutionary Vietnam and Angola were already negotiating with the oil companies even before the smoke had cleared. Nationalization of Western enterprises by Third World countries can have only limited usefulness, since the corporations have now prepared contingency plans for switching production elsewhere and absorbing the losses.

While we wait for better, more encompassing strategies to emerge, those suggested by Barnet and Muller can provide a start. We can find ways to hold the global corporations responsible to the general public, such as new worldwide laws requiring complete financial disclosure; the breakup of holding corporations; repeal of laws favoring investment by U.S.-based corporations overseas; and defeat of pro-corporation legislators working against the public interest.

For several decades the United States has been moving toward ever greater income disparity, not only between rich and poor, but between rich and middle class as well. It is time we seriously considered ways to redistribute income.

Banks should be required by law to get out of non-banking businesses, and bankers to get off the boards of corporations. Local communities could take an aggressive role in requiring corporations in their area to operate with public accountability, worker involvement in decision-making, and less hierarchical plant procedures.

Regulatory commissions might be elective rather than industry-dominated through appointments. Ways could be found to encourage more decentralized cooperatives that handle not only food, but clothing and other necessities as well.

We already have "socialism for the rich, laissez faire for the poor." Since the rich always get the best, why not let the poor and the increasingly exploited middle class have a taste of socialism, too? When will we demand adequate health care for all our people, for example? Why not see to it that the super-rich pay taxes for a change?

But this is only a start. The basic contradiction of capitalism is the most fundamental issue of all. We can no longer sanctify a system premised on greed. The alternative we offer to the present evil order is not anarchy, but the yet unrealized possibility of a more just world. It will emerge, not from the brain of a single thinker, or even from the concerted efforts of many, but from the polar interplay of all the existing powers. It will thus be a compromise: human, fragile, relatively unjust.

But we cannot leave the world to the world managers. Our involvement may mean just the thin margin that edges the order toward greater equity. Short of the kingdom, we may not hope for more. We cannot, in good conscience, hope for less.

The church's involvement in this struggle is crucial. No one expects the corporations and the government to break up their long love affair just for a clean conscience. The massive lobbying powers of the multinationals alone can prevent most of the needed changes. And the churches are implicated in the system right up to their steeples, both as legitimators of the satanic values which make exploitation so easily tolerable to Christians, and as dependents on the financial overflow of its wealthier contributors.

The larger issue is the moral legitimacy of the corporations themselves. Once the churches seriously begin to question their own docile acquiescence in the values of a system premised on exploitation and greed, as the churches of South America and black Africa are already starting to do, then the economic system is under notice that its own collapse is imminent unless it finds a way to reestablish its moral legitimacy.

The church has seldom had a clearer mandate to act. If the churches are willing to suffer loss of status and members for the sake of obedience to the gospel, they can make the manifold wisdom of God known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places (Ephesians 3:10). Their simple message, "Christ is Lord," is the death knell of every subsystem's pretensions to absoluteness, and the glimmer of hope to those who are being exploited.

Finally, it is time to overhaul our national theology of wealth: the blasphemy about God having blessed America. God has done nothing of the kind. This is the source of the heresy that we are rich because we are righteous and righteous because we are rich. God did not "give" this land to the white race. We took it from Indians who were wise enough to know that God had not given it to them either--it was God's. They were simply his guests--"stewards" as the Bible describes it.

No one really knows how to construct a perfect economic system in the United States which greedy people will not subvert to their own gain. But we are free to risk moving toward a way that is more equitable and just, knowing that we are grounded in an inextinguishable love whose banner is the cross. Such love makes one feel wonderfully small, and finite, and human.

Enveloped by such love, which trembles at the suffering of the world's impoverished, how can we do less than everything we can to change ourselves and our system toward the justice which God desires for all his children?

Walter Wink was Auburn professor of biblical interpretation at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City and staff associate at the Hartford Seminary Foundation in Hartford, Connecticut, when this article appeared.